Teacher's Pet
by Moo Chapman
Summary: Sara Sidle is sent to investigate a crime scene that is identical to one that Grissom uses to teach his students.
1. Default Chapter

*~*~*~ Chapter One. The Mocking.  
  
Sara Sidle couldn't believe what she was seeing! It was exactly the same, every single detail, right down to the exact same bedspread.  
  
"Blood smear on the inside door frame, above the top hinge. I'm gonna take a swab" Nick said as his voice filtered through Sara's shock induced haze.  
  
"No" Sara said, her tone taking on an unmistakable order tone even though Nick had sonority. Sara had just made it clear that she was in charge on this case.  
  
"What?" Nick asked relinquishing his authority.  
  
"I want every one out now." Sara announced ignoring Nick's question. Sara pulled her cell phone from her belt she hit one quickly followed by the send button. The phone speed dialled the programmed number and was just as quickly picked up on the other end.  
  
"Grissom" came the disembody voice though the speaker.  
  
"I have a question, Griss" Sara spoke in to her cell, as she once more started to look around the room in which she stood.  
  
"Sara. Aren't you supposed to be at the 'Three Aces'?"  
  
"I am there. Look Griss, the mock scene that you set up at the seminar, do you always use the same scene? Do you ever change it?"  
  
"No it's always the same, I use it to demonstrate at all my advanced lectures..., Sara what is this all about?"  
  
I'm looking at your mock scene, Griss, only this time it not a mock scene."  
  
"How well do you remember it?"  
  
"Picture perfect!"  
  
"OK"  
  
"Griss I hope you were with somebody yesterday."  
  
"Are you telling me that you consider me a suspect... Sara?"  
  
"You created this crime, you re-enacted it maybe a hundred times. I know you didn't do this Grissom, but look at it like a detective, look at it like Ecklie" Sara said just as David arrived on the scene. She held up her hand to David telling him to wait.  
  
"You should send Cath or Warrick down here to replace me, after you any one who took your advanced seminar is a suspect and that's me." Sara said.  
  
She sure as hell didn't want anyone say that she tampered with evidence, certainly not on this case.  
  
"Sara, I want you to stay on this, other then me you know the most about this case."  
  
"No Griss, the killer knows more then I do. But I'll stay if you think that it is for the best." Sara looked at the Officers standing outside the door, she had ordered them out but their curiosity had kept them close. Nick and David watched one with the same curiosity, though David was a little more confused having herd less then the others. She turned away from them and surveyed the scene again.  
  
"Wait a sec, something's different"  
  
"What?" Grissom asked, wishing to be there himself.  
  
"I don't know give me a minute."  
  
"Talk to me. Let me help" Grissom said in calming a tone that Sara immediately associated with the phone calls they used to share when she was still in San Francisco, those very same words were often said during those calls.  
  
"The smell, its the same. It was the first thing that I noticed when I walked in, vinegar and lemons. Blood smear on the door frame Nick found it quicker then I did first time around."  
  
"Nick's good, he sees a lot quickly, you see even more but slowly you never rush, you don't give up until you see it all. Relax, slow down. Slow is what you're good at. Tell me more" Grissom's tone and manner were becoming hypnotic. The words spoken in whisper were pleasing to hear and under different circumstances may have been arousing.  
  
"Her pose, restraints nothing new. She's a brunette fair skin, true English Rose you know. There it is, next to the bed leg." Sara said the last triumphantly.  
  
"Tell me" Grissom said part order part encouragement.  
  
Doing as she was told without pause Sara walked the few steps to the bed and knelt down, pulling her flash lite from her pocket and keeping it in one hand and the phone in the other she shone her flash lite on to the object by the bed leg.  
  
"It's a pipe, a tobacco pipe, an old one. Nick photograph this." Sara said, as she moved aside so that the other CSI could get in close enough to take the shot.  
  
"Thanks Griss" Sara said.  
  
"You found it, Sara"  
  
"Three pipe problem." Sara said watching Nick perform his appointed task.  
  
"Sherlock Holmes."  
  
"His teasing us, challenging us to solve this with less then three pipes."  
  
"There's no better team."  
  
"I have a crime scene to process, hand you case's off and go home Griss"  
  
"That sounds a lot like an order Sara"  
  
"Am I the primary on this case?"  
  
"Yes"  
  
"Then it is an order. I want your notes and any thing else relevant, they're at you place right?"  
  
"Yeah"  
  
"I'll stop by and pick them up." Sara said as her thoughts strayed to keeping this conversation going, keeping this little bit of the past in the present. This little bit of their friendship that she had stumbled across, but knew she couldn't have.  
  
"See ya later Griss" Sara said and disconnected the call before Grissom had a chance to say his own good bye.  
  
"David, give me a time of death, and tag her special processing. We are going to be under the gun on this one. Ecklie and the Sheriff are gonna watch this, just remember it's Grissom's ass on the line."  
  
Nick said nothing but it was clear by his expression that he understood. Nick Stokes was no more apt to mess this case up then Sara herself.  
  
"She's room temp, no rigor." David announced from the bedside.  
  
"I'm done, Doc Robbins will give you a more conclusive time of death but I'd put it between thirty-six and seventy-two hours ago. Sorry Sara that's the best I can do."  
  
"Thanks David, remember special processing." Sara reminded him  
  
"I know we will get it right Sara." David said.  
  
Sara watched, as the brunette's body was loaded in to a body bag and on to the gurney.  
  
She then watched Nick move around the scene with a detachment that surprised her; she made comparisons between how she had worked the mock scene and how Nick now worked its true-life counterpart.  
  
Nick was with out a doubt a brilliant CSI, Grissom had made them all in to the best investigators that they could be, even with out him even being present the thought of disappointing their mentor drove them to be better.  
  
For all the heart ach that Gil Grissom had caused her, she would never leave while he still had more to teach.  
  
Sara left Nick to finish processing the scene and went about doing the same herself, snapping off a photo now and again when she found some thing. She found only two hairs that she didn't expect to be there and a multitude of prints that would be hell for Mandy to sperate.  
  
While doing this she thought back on just how hard it was to get into Grissom's advance class. Her Philosophy Professor who had met Grissom on a flight to New Hampshire and had talked with him about it had asked if he could summit a students name for consideration, she of course was the student, and even though she had no interest in forensics at the time, her academic record and the high opinion of her Professor had bumped her to the top of a very long list. Of the twenty students in the weeklong course more then three quarters were accepted after multiple applications, and she was the only one not working in or studying in the Field of Forensics.  
  
Which in retrospect hadn't served to make her very popular with any of the other students. Sara Sidle was by education, not by nature, a solitary person, so she found little pain in her fellow student's intolerance.  
  
She had been taught by past experience that once her peers realised how different she was she would by cast away from their company, and left once more alone. In keeping with this theory, under which she still to this day lived, she told her peers as little about herself as she could get away with and acted exactly as she thought they expected her to.  
  
"Sara, I think we are done" Nick said, bringing Sara back to the present  
  
"Yeah me too, but there is no way in hell that I'm releasing this scene." Sara said and stared to gather up her things. "Once we get Grissom's notes I want to set the mock scene up in the garage."  
  
"They're going to take us off this Sara" Nick said as though pointing out something that hadn't occurred to her yet.  
  
"We just have to keep working until they do, and afterward if we can"  
  
"Lets go back to the lab" Nick said. There was somthing odd about Sara since she had ended her call with Grissom. The energy that she had lost soon after coming to Las Vegas was back. Once the two CSI's were done packing up their kits and gathering to together the brown paper bags and yellow bindles they left the Deputy to secure the scene. 


	2. the frist stand

I will repost once it's beta read.  
  
Chapter two The First Stand  
  
With out a word of indication on the subject Sara knew that Nick would head down to the evidence locker and log in their evidence, some how she knew he didn't want to have anything to do with this particular autopsy.  
  
Sara didn't stop to find out what body Doc Robins was with, instead she just walked in, she knew that David would have told the head coroner that Grissom with a suspect in this case. The Doc and Grissom had a very good friendship, branching from their sheared fascination with their work.  
  
"Did you really send him home?" Doc Robins asked as she walked up to him to find that she was indeed right that her vic was actually bumped to the top of the list like she had thought she would be.  
  
"Yes, have you got course of death yet?" Sara asked laying her kit out and pulling on her gloves.  
  
"I'm afraid that there is nothing obvious, no sign's of violence or sexual activity, I did find one thing odd though, leaches, actually just the one." Doc said standing in his accustomed stance one hand supporting himself on his crouch and the other idly laying on the autopsy bed, watching her reacting but holding back something.  
  
"The scene was on where near water." Sara said looking over at the coroner.  
  
"And even if the was I highly doubt that in would have closed it's self in a sample jar which somehow managed to find it's way in to her mouth." He handed her the sample encased in an evidence baggie.  
  
"Greg should be able to get some DNA out of that. And I might get some prints." Sara said more to her self then to Robins. She reached over to her kit and put the leach in her kit and took out her scale magnify glass. And moved toward the vic's right leg just as Warrick and Catherine walked in.  
  
"How can we help?" Catherine demanded.  
  
"Who did Grissom hand his case's off to?" Sara asked barley looking up at them  
  
"Cath got them." Warrick said, "I just closed the Walker case."  
  
"Start at her head and work and your way down."  
  
"Sara!" Catherine demanded coursing Sara to look up from the vic for the first time that they had entered. Cath saw in her eyes what Warrick had seen in her posture. She was not going to be bullied on this one, but Cath couldn't help herself she was differently not going to give up her place as Alpha female with out a fight. "With Grissom at home I am in charge of the Lab not you, you don't tell me what case's I work I tell you what case's you work."  
  
"You think you can take me of this case Catherine, you go ahead and try, if you want this case solved back the hell off, because we both know you can't do it, not in time anyway."  
  
"Excuse me?" Catherine asked shocked at the younger woman  
  
"I'm better then you Catherine, you just wont let yourself admit it." Sara said standing tall in front of Catherine and using every bit of her two- inch hight advantage.  
  
"Now you listen-"  
  
"No! I'm working I suggest you do the same." Sara said and went back to her work with out any paying further attention to the woman fuming behind her.  
  
As Catherine stormed out of the autopsy bay, Sara could help but think of the girl in high school who had forced her in to doing all of her homework. It didn't really bother Sara have to do the extra assignments and papers but she hated that she was being used it, rubbed at her pride in bad way. So when said girl told her to write a paper about the abolition of Slavery of her American history paper Sara did and sited several White pride publications for the facts she use to back up her argument that the abolition of slavery was the worst thing that had ever happened to the African American race. The girl of course was told that they could not grade her paper and was sent to the school counsellor were she admitted that she had not written the paper and had in fact threaten a freshmen in to writing it for her. While the girl had been suspended, Sara was tested and found to be frighteningly more advanced then her follow students and was put on a special study programme that was better sited to her intellect. Sara wondered if this little step out side of character would turn out as well as her last.  
  
With Warrick's help the body was quickly processed and Robins able to start cutting.  
  
"Well as you know Rigor Mortis starts after three to four hours in the small muscles of the face, hands, and feet before affecting the larger muscles, as it wears off it follows the same Patten, rigor can take any up to thirty six hours to set in completely and seventy two to wear off,"  
  
"But off corse rigor can be affected by body weight, heat of the environment, and metabolic activity before death." Sara finished for him "I know Doc, but as close as you can get us"  
  
"By the extent of the marbling on her abdomen, I'd have to say sixty to sixty four hours. I hope that helps"  
  
"So do I," Sara said and packed up her kit. "Stick around see get me a corse of death." Sara said to Warrick, as she closed up her kit.  
  
"Where you going to be?" he asked her.  
  
"I'm going to dorp our little friend here off with Greg and then take Brass with me over to Grissom's"  
  
"You don't think Grissom did this do you?"  
  
"If he did he wouldn't have wanted me to work it" Sara said as she walked out of the autopsy bay with out looking back. If she had she would have seen both Robins and Warrick watching her leave with puzzled expressions.  
  
"Power trip?" Al Robins asked surprised by the young woman's words and demeanour.  
  
"Na, I think she's just so worried about Griss that she's forgotten to doubt herself." Warrick answered 


End file.
